‘When the stakes are this high, people show up.’

GGF Director Praful Nargund’s speech at the National Growth Debate

21 April 2026

Good morning and thank you all for being here. 

I’m Praful Nargund, I’m Director of the Good Growth Foundation - the first thing people ask me, surprisingly often, is, is there a bad growth foundation, and that leads on nicely to me talking about what good growth means.

But first and foremost, I want to give thanks to our sponsors - Liberty Global, our headline sponsor for the event, and HP, The Premier League, UK Private Capital and VodafoneThree for supporting today and making this all possible.

The fact that we have the Chancellor, the Shadow Chancellor, the Secretary of State for Energy, ministers, mayors, MPs, businesses, economists, campaigners and unions all in this room today tells you something.

When the stakes are this high, people show up.

And the stakes are high. We are living through an era of permanent volatility, and people are feeling it. 

Not just in rising costs and stretched services, but in something deeper: a growing sense that the choices they once had over their own lives are slipping away.

That is the question that I put to this room today: how do you build an economy where everyone has a stake in creating growth?

That means providing the economic security that lets people make big life choices, the confidence that hard work pays, and the chance to get on - not just get by.

But - for me - that belief comes from somewhere personal.

My family came to Britain because they believed in what it promised: work hard, do the right thing, and you will be rewarded. 

That belief is what meant we committed to Britain - because we knew it committed to us.

As an entrepreneur, I saw that promise up close. 

But I’ve also seen it diluted, by a slow drift towards a model that rewards those who profit when things stay scarce or stuck.

Too many give up on ideas before they’ve started, because the costs and risks are stacked against them, and the incentives are not stacked towards them.

Sometimes it takes coming from the outside to see what’s at stake and what we stand to lose.

And today, that promise - that if you work hard and do the right thing, Britain will meet you halfway - is under pressure. Not just from economics, but from uncertainty itself. 

From the financial crisis to Brexit, from Covid to the devastating wars in Ukraine and now Iran, people feel exposed.

Each shock has been different, but the pattern has been the same: families asked to adapt again, absorb again, tighten their belts again.

And, with the ever-increasing impact of AI, many people see another wave of disruption coming - one they have little control over. That anxiety is pretty understandable. 

But AI - and uncertainty - are not inevitable in their consequences.

Across our economy, there are too many areas where the incentives run in the wrong direction - rewarding those who profit when things stay scarce and stuck, rather than those who invest, build and create.

The developer who sits on land rather than builds on it. The energy supplier whose customers have nowhere else to go. The childcare market that prices parents out before they’ve even started.

In too many sectors it has been more rational to sit on assets than to develop them, more profitable to hold back supply than to expand it, more lucrative to extract from captive customers than to compete for willing ones.

You see the impact in the most basic decisions of everyday life. A generation locked out of secure housing. Parents turning down promotions because childcare costs would wipe out the gains.

Households watching bills rise faster than their ability to respond, because regulation and systems haven’t kept pace with a changing world.

Taken separately, these look like disconnected problems. 

Taken together, they tell a deeper story: that many feel they have lost control over the basic coordinates of their life -where they live, how they work, what kind of future they can build.

And when your life can be knocked sideways by decisions taken far away, you go looking for new answers.

Some are drawn to those who offer easy villains. Others to those who promise to tear the whole system up.

So the challenge for everyone in this room is to provide another answer. 

Does growth shows up in people's ability to plan ahead? Change careers? 

Start a business? Find a home? 

Do they believe again that their effort will be rewarded?

Because if the structural set-up which limits people's agency and choice stays in place, more growth can actually intensify that problem. 

People have seen GDP rise before and watched as their own prospects stayed flat, public services frayed, and housing became more and more out of reach. 

We've called this the growth gap - a very GGF-y topic in our office -  and we saw it play out in the American election of 2024.

Because growth is good when it gives people a stake in building it. 

When they can plan beyond the next bill. When they can change careers or start a business without taking an impossible risk. 

When they can believe again that their effort will be rewarded. When the benefits of a growing economy show up in housing security, in the high street, and in people’s ability to plan ahead - not only in aggregate GDP.

We cannot reach that world by simply growing the pie, but nor can we reach it through redistribution alone. The system itself has to change.

And you can’t get there in one leap. Each step of change has to build on the last - creating the conditions, and the public trust, for what comes next.

The first step is giving people breathing space. Too many are permanently one unexpected bill away from crisis. 

When shocks hit, short-term support is absolutely necessary - we welcome measures that address that immediate pressure that people are facing. 

But in the long-term, the real answer is of course building resilience so people aren't so exposed in the first place.

So as well as the short-term relief, we must be willing to take on the absurdities that make sense in policy land but don’t pass muster in the country at large.

Take the link between gas prices and electricity prices. This was a system designed for a different, more stable world. 

And the public naturally feel frustrated that even as we generate more renewable energy, bills stay high. 

That’s why it’s right that the government looks to evolve the system, recognising the world has moved on.

The next step is turning that breathing space into genuine, lasting choice. 

A planning system that actually delivers secure, affordable homes in the places people want to live - and one which enables the energy infrastructure we need, rather than putting the brakes on it. 

Reforming the rules so we can build near transport, alongside infrastructure projects, and in high‑demand areas isn’t just about housing - it’s about removing those blockers that stand in between ambition and delivery.

A tax system that signals clearly what Britain values: work, innovation and productive investment, not passive extraction.

Take defence spending. The topic of GGF’s next paper.

At a moment when we are increasing what we spend on national security, the question is whether that investment reaches the people who need more choices:

the small business owner who could win a contract, the worker who could retrain into a skilled job, the community that could see new housing built alongside a defence facility.

And we cannot talk about the future without talking about AI. 

AI could be the most powerful tool we have for expanding people’s choices and economic agency; or it could be the next wave of extraction, concentrating gains at the top while workers are left more exposed. 

Which one it becomes depends entirely on the choices we make now about who captures the benefits.

And then we have to make those reforms stick. Britain’s history is full of reforms that looked bold for a few years and then unravelled. 

In a world of constant shocks, that fragility is dangerous. We need institutions built for instability - frameworks that allow governments to invest over decades, but which also ensure that the benefits show up quickly in people’s lives.

That is why fixing the OBR - and the wider framework around it - matters. GGF recently convened a group of organisations to that effect under the Fix the Framework coalition. 

It is why genuine fiscal devolution matters, so that mayors and local leaders can build up their own productive base rather than waiting for permission from the centre. 

So, I started with the question, how do you build an economy where everyone has a stake in creating growth? 

But what we really mean by that, is:

In ten years’ time, when a family looks back at this turbulent decade and at the choices made now, will they be able to say: I was able to build the future I wanted?

If the answer is yes, then we will have created good growth. That is what we campaign for — and that is the conversation the National Growth Debate is here to start.

Thank you.